


A Blue Prius and A Red Station Wagon Roll Into Night Vale

by LunaIrenePond



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: M/M, pretty much every one is in it
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-06-07
Updated: 2014-06-20
Packaged: 2018-02-03 19:16:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1754977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LunaIrenePond/pseuds/LunaIrenePond
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carlos, Jane, and Darcy have come to the decision that they HAVE to figure out what is going on in the town of Night Vale.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Episode 0-intro

**Author's Note:**

> This is pretty much the podcast but told from the scientist point of view and with the understanding that SHIELD is the Vague yet Menacing Government Agency, or World Government... whichever works...

Jane Foster was confused; she and Darcy were finding the same readings from New Mexico, again, but not. It was like, it was there when you glanced at the readings but not when they actually looked. So they went to New York to talk to Thor.

“I don’t understand why you don’t just get your space boyfriend a cell phone,” Darcy complained as she ate the second of three Chick-Fila sandwiches.

“Because there is barley any cell phone service in Asgard,” Jane said as she tried not to curse at the New York traffic.

“Wait, there is cell phone service?” she asked amazed.

“Yeah-“ Jane got cut off as Darcy’s phone went off.

“Hello?” she answered as she shoved more food in her mouth.

“Hey, Darcy its Tony,” the man said on the other end.

“I have caller I.D. I know. What’s up?”

“Those readings you set us were really weird. Thor isn’t quite sure what is up with them but Bruce and I called in a friend and we think we know what is going on. You’re on your way to the tower right?”

“Yeah, but if you could help traffic along that would be great.”

“You know I can’t do that.”

“Hey, it was worth the try.”

“Bye Darcy.”

“Bye Tony,” she said as she hung up and found Jane staring at her. “What?”

“Did Tony Stark just call you?”

“Yeah,” she shrugged, “he’s building me my own floor of the tower.”

James drove the rest of the way in stunned silence. “Hey who go the Prius?” Darcy asked upon walking into Tony’s lab.”

“What?” he asked absent mindedly as he typed away at his computer.

“In the parking deck, we ended up next to a Prius. Who is trying to be earth friendly?”

“Guilty,” came a reply from the other end of the lab.

“Carlos!” Darcy yelled as she went running to hug the espresso colored man across the room.

“Darcy, oh my gosh, it’s so nice to see you, it’s been like five years,” the gangly man said smiling.

“Oh, so you know each other,” Bruce smiled from his computer.

“Um, should I?” Jane asked.

“Oh,” Darcy said practically bouncing. “Jane this is Carlos, we went to high school together. Carlos this is Jane I was her intern.”

“Nice to meet you,” Carlos grinned as he shook Jane’s hand.

“You too.”

“Good, now that we are all well equated shall we get started?” To said clapping his hands together and the room went dark. For the next three hours the five of them went over all the readings they had. Turns out it was coming from a town called Night Vale and SHIELD had been keeping track of them for years, mostly because they were really fucking weird. Carlos was helpful seeing as he had majored in ‘weird fucking science’ in college, not really but that’s what Darcy kept calling it. By the time it was dark outside they had made up their mind, they were going to have to go to Night Vale.

“Who is going to go?” Tony asked. “I need to stay here.”

“I can go,” Carlos volunteered.

“I can too,” Jane said eagerly.

“Oh, and I can bring my intern!” Darcy said excitedly.

“You have an intern?” Carlos asked. He was slightly worried, for the intern’s sake.

“Yes.”

“What’s their name?”

“Intern.”

“Okay,” Carlos shrugged. “I’m glad you haven’t changed.”

“Is there anyone else that could come?” Tony asked.

“Yeah, I have a couple friends that live on the way there,” Carlos supplied.

“Okay, could you call them up?” Jane asked.

“Yeah, I’ll just step out, they should still be awake.”

Jane turned on the other three as soon as he got out of the room, “Who invited him?”

“I did,” Bruce said he was trill working on his computer. “He’s a good scientist and probably the best equipped for this. SHIELD has been watching him.

“Why?”

“He specializes in things that SHIELD would rather the world not know about,” he explained.

“We can send a group of you there but it comes with the realization that SHEILD has to also get all of your findings.” Tony added.

“That’s not too bad,” Darcy shrugged. “At least we can have the information this time.”

Carlos stepped back in before Jane could object, “Hey, um, Dave and Rochelle said they can be ready in a couple days.”

“That’s great,” Darcy smiled. “I can make Intern be ready by tomorrow night.”

“Awesome,” Jane smiled.

“Then we can head out on Friday?” Carlos suggested.

“Yeah, so if everything goes right we’ll get there on the fifteenth,” Darcy said doing the math.

“How long do you think we’ll be there?” Jane asked.

Carlos shrugged, “Till we’ve figured it out.”

“So a long time.”

“I hope they have a movie theater,” Darcy wondered.

“Your priorities,” Jane complained as she rolled her eyes.


	2. episode 1-pilot

Darcy, Jane and the intern had been following Carlos’s Prius in their own car for the past few days. For the last hour they had been listening to some radio station that had been playing 2K pop. As Jane turned onto route 800 Darcy reached up to change the channel, but before she could hit the button, it changed on its own. 

“A friendly desert community where the sun is hot, the moon is beautiful, and mysterious lights pass overhead while we all pretend to sleep. Welcome to Night Vale,” said a deep and smooth voice from the radio.

“Darcy, change the station,” Jane said worried. 

She started to hit every button of the radio, “I can’t, he’s on all of them.”

“What do you mean he’s on all of them?”

“Like ‘I can’t change it he’s on everyone’.”

“What?!” came a worried response from the back seat.

“Shut up intern, I’m calling Carlos,” he picked up on the third ring. “Carlos, is you radio on?”

“Yeah, it just turned on as we pulled onto route 800.”

“This town is so weird.”

“I know right?”

“Hey, you know the house Tony rented out, right?”

“Yeah,”

“Okay, I’ll see you when we get there.”

“Bye, Darcy.”

“Bye, Carlos.”

“So?” Jane asked as Darcy hung up. The man had moved onto Dog Parks and Angles that weren’t real.

“He’s just as weirded out as we are.”

“Great.”

“This is not worth the college credit,” came a complaint from the back seat.

“Shut your cake hole,” Darcy yelled back.

Their first order of business once they go to there was to set up the lab. It was right next to some pizza place called Big Rico’s. As the radio show host had said, “No one does a slice like Big Rico’s, no one.”

As the six of them carried boxes and suitcases into the house the radio played and the man’s voice rang out through both of the cars and the portable radio they had already put in the house. “A commercial airliner flying through local airspace disappeared today, only to reappear in the Night Vale Elementary gymnasium during basketball practice, disrupting practice quite badly. The jet roared through the small gym for only a fraction of a second. And before it could strike any players or structure, it vanished again. This time, apparently, for good. There is no word yet on if or how this will affect Night Vale Mountain Lions’ game schedule…”

“Carlos, this town is weird,” came a complaint from the uperfloor of the house.

“I swear to God the next person who complains about this town being weird will have to cook and clean for everyone for the next year.” Carlos was fed up with everyone complaining.

“Sorry, it’s just that it’s going to take some getting used to.”

Once everything was where it needed to be Carlos called a conference in the kitchen. “So what are we going to do now?” he asked them all.

After a few moments Darcy spoke up, “We could always ask to call a town meeting.”

“Who’s going to lead it though,” Dave asked. He was the second of the two scientists, Rochelle was the first. 

“I think Carlos should,” the intern, Ian, suggested. “The radio guy seems to like you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well…” Darcy started. “He referred to the scientist as a male with perfect hair. Dave is bald and intern’s hair is far from perfect.

“Hey,” Ian scowled.

“It’s true,” Rochelle added.

“Fine, okay, I’ll call a meeting,” Carlos sighed.

About an hour later the six of them were standing in the front of the main room of Town Hall. Darcy zoned in and out catching words such as, “the most interesting town in the United States.” She was paying more attention to the crowed. In the very back were all the official looking people. Half of them wore suits and sunglasses while the other half mostly looked like police officers. The people sitting in the crowed were very strange; well she guessed they were people. There were twenty to forty, they kept shifting, that were all ten feet tall and had wings, Darcy figured that these were the angels that didn’t exist. A good fifty more were teenagers in sweat pants and Hoodies, she couldn’t see under the hoods. The rest looked rather human. What surprised her about them was the diversity. There seemed to be every race present and everyone had some type of piercing or tattoo, even the children. It seemed to be that when people got scars they would blend them into intact tattoos. Darcy thought it was beautiful. She also couldn’t help but notice the families. There were families of a mom or a dad with five kids, two moms or two dads with any number of kids, and of course there were the traditional families but they seemed very low in count. There also was a very low amount of elderly, the oldest person seemed to be the little blue haired Hispanic lady who was surrounded by people who certainly weren’t angels. Darcy made a not to check what the normal life span was.

After Carlos and Jane were finished talking they all left to a gathering space where the woman Darcy had notice had made cornbread. She wondered over to where she was standing and eating. “Hi dear,” she smiled at her. “How do you like my cornbread?”

“It’s great, but it doesn’t have any salt.”

“Yes,” she said looking sad. “The Angels had taken her salt for a Godly mission, and I haven’t yet gotten around to buying more. My name is Old Woman Josie by the way.”

“Oh it’s nice to meet you, I’m Darcy Lewis.” She said as she shook Old Woman Josie’s hand.

“It’s nice to meet you too,” the elderly lady smiled. “Oh look its Cecil talking to that nice young man that’s with you all.”

Darcy searched the room before finding Carlos and a Native American looking man talking intimately, “Oh that’s Carlos.”

“Ah, Cecil is the radio show host, you know. He probably left the poor intern at the station playing prerecorded things,” Old Woman Josie smiled as she looked fondly at the two men.

Darcy couldn’t help but ask, “So was Cecil doing the show when we came into town?”

“Oh yes, you must have caught the very beginning of it,” she said explaining. “On the first and fifteenth of each month he has a show from three to nine then every other day from noon to two. He’s a very strong minded young man.”

The two of them spent the next half an hour talking about great books and how cute the two men seemed together. As soon as they got back to the house she turned the radio on while the others swapped gossip and theories about what was going on. They were so caught up in their conversation that they almost missed Cecil as he started to talk about Carlos again, “He grinned, and everything about him was perfect, and I fell in love instantly.”

“Dude,” Dave laughed.

“What?” Carlos said he seemed personally offended.

“You have that man wrapped around your little finger,” Rochelle smiled.

“What did you talk about with him?” Ian asked.

“Nothing, it was complete small talk,” Carlos said in his defense.

“Did you get a number?” Darcy asked.

“Well…” Carlos help up a scrap piece of paper with a number and the name Cecil Gershwin Palmer scrawled on it.

“Dude!” the five other shouted and started talking over each other.

“Guys! Can we move on right now?” Carlos asked.

“Fine, what do you guys want to do?” Jane asked.

“We could go adventuring?” Dave suggested.

What followed was bested summed up by Cecil himself…. 

Carlos and his team of scientists warn that one of the houses in the new development of Desert Creek, out back of the elementary school, doesn’t actually exist. "It seems like it exists," explained Carlos and his perfect hair. "Like it’s just right there when you look at it. And it’s between two other identical houses, so it would make more sense for it to be there than not." But, he says, they have done experiments and the house is definitely not there. At news time, the scientists are standing in a group on the sidewalk in front of the nonexistent house, daring each other to go knock on the door. Carlos and his scientists at the monitoring station near Route 800 say their seismic monitors have been indicating wild seismic shifts — meaning to say that the ground should be going up and down all over the place. I don’t know about you folks, but the ground has been as still as the crust of a tiny globe rocketing through an endless void could be. Carlos says that they’ve double-checked the monitors and they are in perfect working order. To put it plainly, there appears to be catastrophic earthquakes happening right here in Night Vale that absolutely no one can feel.

They all went to bed that night with a little too much to think about.


	3. episode 2-glow cloud

Rochelle was not having a good day. She had woken up on a completely empty stomach, seeing as it was already around two. She had promised to call her mom and her boyfriend twice a month so already she had five missed calls and twenty unopened text messages between the two of them. What was worse was that she had missed Dave’s cooking. Every morning he would cook breakfast, he made the best blueberry pancakes ever. What was even worse was that it was raining dead animals outside. She just wanted to go back to sleep, but she was way too hungry. As she walked down the stairs to raid the fridge the thumping of animals on the roof gained volume and frequency. She brushed it off as nothing out of the ordinary. The fridge was full of things that certainly were not food, she made a mental not to ask Mr. Stark for a second one just for food. Finally she found some pizza and went to go work on some equations for an experiment they had been working on long into the night. Her phone lit up with a text half way through her work. “Go turn on the radio –Carlos.”

As soon as she turned it on the man named Cecil started to talk about the current weather outside, “This is probably nothing listeners, but John Peters — you know, the farmer — he reports that the Glow Cloud is directly over Old Town Night Vale, and appears to be raining small creatures upon the earth. Armadillos, lizards, a few crows, that kind of thing.

“Fortunately, the animals appear to be dead already, so the Night Vale Animal Control Department has said that it should be a snap to clean those up. They just have to be tossed on the eternal animal pyre in Mission Grove Park, so, if that’s the worst the Glow Cloud has for us, I say go ahead and do your daily errands. Just bring along a good strong umbrella capable of handling falling animals up to, say, ten pounds.

“More on the Glow Cloud as it continues to crawl across our sky.”

“Is this what you all are doing?” Rochelle texted back.

“Yeah, well, Darcy and Ian are trying to get the lion off of the White Sand Ice Cream Shop.”

Typical, Rochelle thought laughing. They had only been there two weeks and already Darcy and she had become fast friends. As the day went on Rochelle called up her mom and her boyfriend to convince them that everything was okay. Somehow it worked. Later Jane came back and started to run test on a few dead animals that had fallen from the cloud. “Do you need any help?”

“Yeah,” Jane said handing her one of the animals. “Run a blood test on this thing.”

“What am I looking for?” she asked as she drew blood from the poor lizard.

“Anything that makes it not a normal lizard.”

“Well that narrows it down,” she rolled her eyes. After about half an hour Rochelle sighed. “It’s completely normal.”

“Yeah, all of them seem to be,” Jane said pushing away from her desk.

“So what did that cloud look like?” she asked as they walked into the kitchen together to get some tea.

“It kept changing colors, as soon as you decided it was one color it would change.”

“That’s not the strangest thing that has happened in this town.”

“Yeah but it’s dropping dead animals and that’s pretty unsanitary,” she pointed out laughing.

Pretty soon they called Carlos and were talking to Dave and him on speaker phone about different ways to save the town. Half way through discussing the four of them all were interrupted by speaking unanimously. “The Glow Cloud does not need to converse with us. It does not feel as we tiny humans feel. It has no need for thoughts or feelings of love. The Glow Cloud simply is. All hail the mighty Glow Cloud! All hail!”

“What was that?” Carlos asked confused.

“I- I don’t know,” Jane said worried.

“The glow cloud’s gone,” Dave said cautiously.

“It smells like vanilla,” Rochelle smiled.

“Yeah, that’s weird.”

“Hey, I just got a text from Darcy, she says that they got the lion off the roof,” Carlos said excitedly.

“Does that mean free ice-cream?” Rochelle asked excitedly.

“Yes Rochelle,” he laughed. “It does.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey guys! Tell me what you think, i really like talking to you all!


	4. episode 3-station managment

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have discovered the type of Station Wagon Darcy was driving in Thor the Dark World, it was a Volvo...

They had been there a month and Carlos was still confused. He wasn’t used to being confused, so this was a first for him. But he was starting to become less amazed at his confusion. He had stopped staring at the hooded figures, the angles (that weren’t real,), and the sheriffs secret police had stopped randomly searching him. So everything was mostly normal, but there comes a time in every scientist life in which they need to get a hair cut

Yes, Carlos was aware that his hair was a source of affection for the radio host but he really needed his hair cut. It was curly, long. And thick and frankly it never did what he wanted it to. The day had started out okay, well until Darcy tried to read her book.

“Carlos!” he heard from the upper bedroom.

“What?!” he yelled back from the kitchen.

“My book isn’t working!”

“What do you mean not working?!” 

“As in, its shooting sparks at me!”

“How?!” 

“I don’t know!” 

“Darcy, get down here!”

Darcy ran down to the kitchen, “here, see for yourself.” She threw the book at Carlos’s head.

Carlos caught it and looked at the cover. “The fourth Harry Potter, really?”

“What, you don’t like Potter?”

“No, I love him just, this wasn’t the best one.”

“Oh, just open it.”

Carlos opened it to find that it started to spray out gas, “That smells like sulfur.” He slammed the book shut and wrinkled his nose. “Do you know if anyone else has opened a book today?”

“I don’t know, I’ll go check,” Darcy said bouncing up and began to run around the house yelling at people about books. After a few minutes later they had a stack of books on the main table in the dining room. They couldn’t find a single book that didn’t attack them in some way.

“Someone should inform the radio station, get the word out,” Rochelle suggested.

“Aren’t you going to go get a haircut?” Darcy asked.

“Yes why?” Carlos glared.

“Well the station is on the way.”

“Fine, I’ll go. But I hate you all,” Carlos groaned.

“You know you love him,” Rochelle smiled. 

“I really don’t,” Carlos glared again as he pulled of his sweater before stepping into the heat. The heat was something that he wasn’t going to get used to, but it was a lot better than the humidity of the east. He spent the ten minute walk to the station trying to figure out what he was going to say to Cecil. He was a strange man, tall and gangly, he was practically paper white and he had dark purple hair which matched his strange tattoos. Carlos thought that everything about him was weird. Turned out Carlos didn’t have to worry, intern Jerry told him that he would tell Cecil about the books. Chad the intern was off trying to buy a tennis racquet; Carlos wasn’t sure what to make of that. In any case Carlos waked the remaining blocks to the barber shop and got a haircut without much drama. Telly the Barber was a pretty nice guy, had weird pictures of combs, but other than that he was pretty nice. The rest of the day passed rather uneventfully well, as uneventful as Night Vale could be. Telly was run out of town, two radio interns died, they still had no idea about what was up with the books, and Cecil had been eaten (?) by station management. Carlos made a mental note to ask Leland, the new intern, about that when he had time. But personally Carlos thought his new haircut was great.


End file.
